“You can go now,” she said. “You needn’t wait on the Yankees.”
“Go?” Lucius said. “I aint free.”
“You’ve been free for almost three minutes,” Granny said. “Go on.”
Lucius blinked his eyes while you could have counted about ten. “Go where?” he said.
“I can’t tell you,” Granny said. “I aint free. I would imagine you will have all Yankeedom to move around in.”
Lucius blinked his eyes. He didn’t look at Granny now. “Was that all you wanted?” he said.
“Yes,” Granny said. So he went back to the garden. And that was the last we heard about being free from him. That is, it quit showing in the way he acted, and if he talked any more of it, even Louvinia never thought it was worth bothering Granny with. It was Granny who would do the reminding of it, especially to Philadelphia, especially on the nights when we would stand like race-horses at the barrier, watching Granny’s hands until they clapped together.
Each one of us knew exactly what he was to do. I would go upstairs for Granny’s gold hatpin and her silver-headed umbrella and her plumed Sunday hat because she had already sent her ear-rings and brooch to Richmond a long time ago, and to Father’s room for his silver-backed brushes and to Cousin Melisandre’s room after she came to live with us for her things because the one time Granny let Cousin Melisandre try to help too, Cousin Melisandre brought all her dresses down. Ringo would go to the parlor for the candle-sticks and Granny’s dulcimer and the medallion of Father’s mother back in Carolina.
And we would run back to the dining-room where Louvinia and Lucius would have the sideboard almost cleared, and Granny still standing there and watching the clock-face and the trunk both now with her hands ready to pop again and they would pop and Ringo and I would stop at the cellar door just long enough to snatch up the shovels and run on to the orchard and snatch the brush and grass and the criss-crossed sticks away and have the pit open and ready by the time we saw them coming: first Louvinia with the lantern, then Joby and Lucius with the trunk and Granny walking beside it and Cousin Melisandre and Philadelphia (and on that one time Father, walking along and laughing) following behind.
And on that first night, the kitchen clock wasn’t in the trunk. Granny was carrying it, while Louvinia held the lantern so that Granny could watch the hand, Granny made us put the trunk into the pit and shovel the dirt back and smooth it off and lay the brush and grass back over it again and then dig up the trunk and carry it back to the house.
And one night, it seemed like we had been bringing the trunk down from the attic and putting the silver into it and carrying it out to the pit and uncovering the pit and then covering the pit again and turning around and carrying the trunk back to the house and taking the silver out and putting it back where we got it from all winter and all summer too; — that night, and I don’t know who thought of it first, maybe it was all of us at once.
But anyway the clock-hand had passed four hour-marks before Granny’s hands even popped for Ringo and me to run and open the pit. And they came with the trunk and Ringo and I hadn’t even put down the last armful of brush and sticks, to save having to stoop to pick it up again, and Lucius hadn’t even put down his end of the trunk for the same reason and I reckon Louvinia was the only one that knew what was coming next because Ringo and I didn’t know that the kitchen clock was still sitting on the dining-room table.
Then Granny spoke. It was the first time we had ever heard her speak between when she would tell Ringo, “Go call Joby and Lucius,” and then tell us both about thirty minutes later: “Wash your feet and go to bed.” It was not loud and not long, just two words: “Bury it.” And we lowered the trunk into the pit and Joby and Lucius threw the dirt back in and even then Ringo and I didn’t move with the brush until Granny spoke again, not loud this time either: “Go on. Hide the pit.”
And we put the brush back and Granny said, “Dig it up.” And we dug up the trunk and carried it back into the house and put the things back where we got them from and that was when I saw the kitchen clock still sitting on the dining-room table. And we all stood there watching Granny’s hands until they popped together and that time we filled the trunk and carried it out to the orchard and lowered it into the pit quicker than we had ever done before.
II
And then when the time came to really bury the silver, it was too late. After it was all over and Cousin Melisandre and Cousin Philip were finally married and Father had got done laughing, Father said that always happened when a heterogeneous collection of people who were cohered simply by an uncomplex will for freedom engaged with a tyrannous machine. He said they would always lose the first battles, and if they were outnumbered and outweighed enough, it would seem to an outsider that they were going to lose them all. But they would not.
They could not be defeated; if they just willed that freedom strongly and completely enough to sacrifice all else for it — ease and comfort and fatness of spirit and all, until whatever it was they had left would be enough, no matter how little it was — that very freedom itself would finally conquer the machine as a negative force like drouth or flood could strangle it. And later still, after two more years and we knew we were going to lose the war, he was still saying that. He said, “I won’t see it but you will. You will see it in the next war, and in all the wars Americans will have to fight from then on.
There will be men from the South in the forefront of all the battles, even leading some of them, helping those who conquered us defend that same freedom which they believed they had taken from us.” And that happened: thirty years later, and General Wheeler, whom Father would have called apostate, commanding in Cuba, and whom old General Early did call apostate and matricide too in the office of the Richmond editor when he said: “I would like to have lived so that when my time comes, I will see Robert Lee again. But since I haven’t, I’m certainly going to enjoy watching the devil burn that blue coat off Joe Wheeler.”
We didn’t have time. We didn’t even know there were any Yankees in Jefferson, let alone within a mile of Sartoris. There never had been many. There was no railroad then and no river big enough for big boats and nothing in Jefferson they would have wanted even if they had come, since this was before Father had had time to worry them enough for General Grant to issue a general order with a reward for his capture. So we had got used to the war.
We thought of it as being definitely fixed and established as a railroad or a river is, moving east along the railroad from Memphis and south along the River toward Vicksburg. We had heard tales of Yankee pillage and most of the people around Jefferson stayed ready to bury their silver fast too, though I don’t reckon any of them practiced doing it like we did. But nobody we knew was even kin to anyone who had been pillaged, and so I don’t think that even Lucius really expected any Yankees until that morning.
It was about eleven o’clock. The table was already set for dinner and everybody was beginning to kind of ease up so we would be sure to hear when Louvinia went out to the back gallery and rang the bell, when Ab Snopes came in at a dead run, on a strange horse as usual. He was a member of Father’s troop. Not a fighting member; he called himself father’s horse-captain, whatever he meant by it, though we had a pretty good idea, and none of us at least knew what he was doing in Jefferson when the troop was supposed to be up in Tennessee with General Bragg, and probably nobody anywhere knew the actual truth about how he got the horse, galloping across the yard and right through one of Granny’s flower beds because I reckon he figured that carrying a message he could risk it, and on around to the back because he knew that, message or no message, he better not come to Granny’s front door hollering that way, sitting that strange blown horse with a U.S. army brand on it you could read three hundred yards and yelling up at Granny that General Forrest was in Jefferson but there was a whole regiment of Yankee cavalry not a half a mile down the road.
So we never had time. Afterward Father admitted that Granny’s error was not in strategy nor tactics either, even though
